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I love how the CF lands and doesn't react at all to what he just did. He's completely nonchalant throwing the ball back in. He's trying to play it off so cool, but he just can't hold back that ear to ear grin.

EDIT: I saw Edmonds make a great HR-robbing catch against the Reds. He just took off in a dead sprint screaming like he just won the lottery. Edmonds' play would be on the opposite end of the celebration spectrum to this.

Wow. I'm speechless. Do you remember that fake video that circulated around the Internet a couple of years ago that purported to show a minor league ballgirl make an incredible wall-scaling catch (it turned out to actually be a Gatorade viral ad or something like that)? This catch is better, and real (not to mention that the ball the fake ballgirl caught was foul anyway).

When did scaling the wall become a Thing? Who are the earliest guys known for making this kind of play?
I remember Dave Winfield's cleats digging into the padding, but he didn't do that all the time, did he?

My earliest memory of a catch going up a wall to rob a home run was Willie McGee (which probably says more about my age than anything else). I feel like I also have a vague memory of Yaz's catching a ball and going over the right field wall in 1983, but that's one that probably wouldn't withstand a James/Neyer tracer.

Why do Japanese teams have their team names written in English on their unis? According to Babelfish, "carp" is ?? in Japanese

Japanese uniforms use English for the same reason Major League Soccer teams have names like DC United, Real Salt Lake, and Toronto FC. Those are the kinds of names that exist in soccer around the world, particularly among successful teams. Baseball is an American game, so the Japanese teams were named in the American style. All NPB names are in English, and so the uniforms are written in English. The name of the Hiroshima team is not koi, it's "Carp", so the team name is in English.

There is a practical reason for using English rather than Japanese. For example, koi is commonly written ??, but this is akin to using italics for Latin scientific names. If I'm writing a scholarly article, I'd use ??, but if I was writing a poem or trying to evoke the image of the fish, I'd use the Chinese character: ?. Now imagine trying to read that from a distance, on a uniform. English (particularly the written variety) is compulsory in Japanese schools, so no one really has a problem reading uniforms.

More ballparks should be designed so outfielders can climb the walls. The Red Sox could put rungs going up the Green Monster.

I'm pretty sure that under MLB rules that ball would have been declared a homer. Well, that is if the umps had the balls to call the rulebook and I'm sure managers like LaRussa would make sure the ump didn't forget the rulebook.

Didn't say it was impossible (many Japanese high schools use Chinese characters on their uniforms), only that Roman letters lend themselves better to uniform graphic design. On the flip side, kanji/hanzi lend themselves better to hat logos!

According to BB-Ref, Yaz last played RF in 1980, when he played 4 games, starting 1, 15 innings total, and made 3 catches. Somebody else can try to find his three catches that season to see if any of them might have been home-run robberies in Fenway.

Actually, looking closer, according to BB-Ref, he only played RF 8 times total in his career and only made a grand total of 5 putouts there (he started 2 games each in 1965 and 1977; he had no total chances in the former season, 2 putouts in the latter).

I remember hearing that Curt Flood "climbed walls". That was probably a reference to a particular play he made in the mid 1960's, but I never saw a clip and can't pin it down any better than that. Maybe Brock Hanke could tell us?

Ron Woods was known for regularly making catches at the old Yankee Stadium in which he would leap and then fall over the right field wall into the bleachers. The old Stadium had a very low fence in right field, making this sort of thing possible, but Woods was particularly good at it--and brave enough to land headfirst in the right field stands.

That was pretty sweet. Helped by the wall that looks like it is maybe 6 feet high? Aren't major league park walls typically higher? 8 feet? Allowed him to get his foot up on the top of it.

Typically, though a few parks retain the four-foot wall in the corners (Anaheim and Chavez Ravine, and Fenway for the all of right field. There may be a few others. I can't think of any six-footers in MLB, though I can't say for sure.

The coolest catch I can remember watching live is the one Otis Nixon made in like 1991-92. He just ran up the wall and planted his foot to make the catch. TBS ran that in their lead-in to games for like a decade after that. This one was almost as good if I'd watched it live.

If the memory is not completely made up, it must be someone's going over the fence to rob (or nearly rob) Yaz of a home run then. I readily acknowledge that memory is a tricky thing. (He didn't have THAT many home runs in 1983 -- how many were at home? Chances are that it was on a Saturday since I saw it on tv and I was young enough for it to have been a day game -- that makes it sound a lot like an NBC Game of the Week).

I'm pretty sure the Red Sox player who caught a ball and went over the fence was Dewey.

He famously did so in the 1975 WS, going over the low wall in the RF corner to rob Morgan (?) and double up Griffey (?) at first. A great catch at a big moment, but not as "circus" as this one.

The coolest catch I can remember watching live is the one Otis Nixon made in like 1991-92. He just ran up the wall and planted his foot to make the catch. TBS ran that in their lead-in to games for like a decade after that. This one was almost as good if I'd watched it live.

Like Evans' catch and the Devon White shoulda been triple play in the World Series, Nixon's catch was all the more impressive for the context in which it occurred. It was the first year the Braves got good, late in the season, big game against a division rival (Cincinnati, IIRC) and I think it actually ended the game with, at least, the tying run on base.

Nixon's catch was against Pittsburgh, and I'm pretty sure it was an early or mid-season game. The only reason I remember the timing is that I was coaching Little League that year, and one of the other coaches was talking about it at practice. The Braves only had one hit in that game, but won 1-0.

Nixon's catch was in the ninth inning, and it preserved a 13 game winning streak in 1992, which is the context that made it more dramatic. It wasn't actually game ending; Bonds came up and grounded out.